My brain has a SERIOUS defect! (warning, not light-hearted!)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, Astrogirl called a minute ago… she’s drunk, and near tears…

Me: What’s wrong?
AG: Just thinking about Jung-In…
Me: Jung-In? (a friend of AG’s that I met once a couple of years ago…)
AG: Yeah…
Me: What’s wrong with Jung-In?

Break here to explain: Jung-In was a friend of AG from high school (not a particularly close friend, if that helps, which it doesn’t…). Jung-In got married in one of the traditional Korean ways: IE: her parents set her up for a blind date with the son of a friend of theirs, she decided that he didn’t suck too badly, and got married to him. After the marriage, it turned out that the husband DID suck, BADLY! Jung-In did NOT have a happy marriage (exactly why, I don’t know… all of the info I have on this is at least third-hand. I do know that the marriage was not happy, and Jung-In and her husband were separated after a few months, and living in different places…). End of break

To resume:
Me: What’s wrong with Jung-In?
AG: She committed suicide!
Me: She DID?? When?
AG: Saturday! I told you!
Me: You did?? When??
AG: Sunday night! You don’t remember?
Me: No, I don’t remember!
AG: I called you Sunday night about 12:30! You must have been sleeping…
Me: I don’t remember that… sorry!
AG: It’s OK… I know about you…
ETC.

Now I feel like crap!! My brain has three modes: awake, asleep, and somewhere in between (where I can operate and hold semi-lucid conversations when I am pulled from sleep, but don’t remember later…) Astrogirl called me while I was asleep, and I answered the phone without fully waking up! She told me about a friend committing suicide, and it went in one ear and completely out the other because I was still in LaLa land!!

This has a particularly apropriate precedent: several years ago, I was living with an ex-girlfriend in Oregon. I was working the night-shift, and so was blissfully asleep at 1 or 2 pm. when the GF came in and woke me up. She told me about this conversation later, and I have NO RECALL WHATSOEVER of it!

GF: Wake up!
Me: Huh? Whazzup?
GF: Ben just called… he said that Derek (a friend) killed himself!
Me: What? When? How?
GF: Last night… with a pistol… according to the note he left, he did it because of the breakup with his girlfriend… I’m sorry!
Me: OK…
GF: OK…

Astroboy goes back to sleep…

A few days later:

GF: Are you going to the funeral?
Me: What funeral?
GF: Derek’s!
Me: Huh???
GF: Derek killed himself! I told you! The funeral is today, up in Corvallis!
Me: WHAT???

I feel like shit! Astrogirl TOLD me that her friend killed herself, and I was asleep at the time and have no memory of it at all!

Something is seriously wrong with me!!

2

FTR: Astrogirl is not mad at me over this… she knows about my “sleeping-amnesia”…

But I still feel like shit…

3

Well, I know I’m not Korean, so therefore you’re not Mr. S posting incognito. He has done the same thing to me. Once I called him all excited to tell him I’d gotten the job I wanted, and we conversed for several minutes. Later he knew nothing about it. He’d been asleep during our conversation. He tells me he’s also fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence . . . when HE was the one talking.

You’re not alone, Astroboy!

4

Thanks, Scarlett…

I still feel like shit, though!

I should be able to wake up and remember stuff like this! But it seems like I can’t…

5

This happens to me too!

I’ve had entire conversations with my mom, and not remembered any of it later.

Don’t feel bad - it’s a natural thing to be a bit fuzzy when yer sleeping.

Al.

6

[ul]Nothing[/ul] is wrong with you. When people are wakened from a deep sleep, they are unable to process or retain fresh information. I don’t have any hard facts to back me up, but I have found that to be true from personal experience. What matters is not whether you retain info you were told about some stranger (to you) while still sleep intoxicated, but that you are there to comfort AstrogirlG while you are awake. Tell AG Mian hamnida from me.

7

My sister has the same difficulty with early morning conversations (my best time of day). - I would have to leave her a note reminding her that:

“Yes, we are going to the movies tonight, and you’re paying this time.”
“Yes, you let me borrow 15 dollars for gas.”
“Yes, we are using your car to drive to the Thousand Islands this weekend.”

as we discussed before I went off to work and she still had two hours to sleep. And she was perfectly lucid during the conversation, sitting up in bed, eyes open, not rolled in the conforter and drooling. After awhile, we both accepted the fact that she was not a morning person, and I would just leave a note.

In any case, sorry to hear about Jung-In, and be there for AG.

8

Astroboy, I don’t know if it will make you feel better, but I do this too. My mother had an annoying habit of coming to my door, and speaking to me to wake me. It got to the point where I would answer without waking up. So then she started coming into my room and making me sit up and open my eyes and speak to her before she’d go and leave me to get up, but I just started doing what she wanted without waking up. I can get out of bed, walk across the room, switch my alarm clock off (actually, the alarm no longer wakes me, but it used to) and go back to bed without waking up - talking is a cinch. Phone conversations, talking to people in the room… I sleep through all of it.

I’m sorry that this unfortunate skill came in to play at such a sensative moment. Give my regards and sympathy to AG.

9

I’ve done the same thing, even to the point of getting up, climbing out of my 5 foot high dorm room loft, answering the phone, having a 2 minute conversation, and climbing back up the ladder to my bed. It sucks, especially when it causes others more grief or effort than would normally be neccessary.

My condolences on your loss :frowning:

10

Astroboy,
I know exactly how you feel, because Ex-Mr. Skerri had the same problem. And he was terribly upset about it.
Ex had lots of sleeping problems. He had sleep apnea, and sometimes during the night, he would quit breathing. I would practically have to smack him to wake him sometimes. He went to a doctor, who at first told me to wake him from these episodes.
So, every night, I would wake him two or three times a night to get him to start breathing again. His problem was that he never remembered me waking him up at all! He would wake up the next morning when I got up to go to work, and b*tch and complain about how I was not helping him. Then I would have to explain how I tried to wake him up all night. Jeeze…

Anyways. At least Astrogirl knows about the problem.I think the only way to work around it is to have someone physically wake you up, cut on the lights, and ask you things to make sure you’re coherent. Now, if there’s a phone call, that makes it more difficult. It’s hard to wake up for a phone call, I know. I’ve had several phone conversations while in deep sleep. I think that for now, you may just consider cutting the ringer off at night, and letting the machine get it. It’s better to be able to carry on a conversation when you’re cognisant of what is going on, anyways.

Good luck!!!

11

Maybe it would help not to have the phone right next to the bed? Due to poor planning, we don’t have a phone in our bedroom, so I have to actually get up and stumble over to the next room, by which time the answering machine has usually picked up–but I’m definitely awake by then!

My husband has the same problem. Scary how he can be totally coherent.
After a long conversation covering several topics:
Me: You’re not going to remember this in the morning, are you?
He: (resentfully) Of course I will.
And he doesn’t, of course.

12

Heh, heh, heh…where’s Astrogirl?

My husband has this condition, and I learned something VERY interesting. Under the circumstances described, he will answer any and all questions put to him, fully and completely. Much to his horror. :smiley:

HOWEVER, I never ask unless I really need the answer. Y’know, be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

13

Astroboy, the same thing happens to me all the time. I sleep right through my alarm, even though I keep hitting the snooze in my sleep. Mr. Jeannie will come in, wake me up, then 15 minutes later, I actually wake up. I say, “Why didn’t you wake me?” and he’ll say that he did. Sometimes, he says I even have my eyes open.

Please accept my condolences on your loss.

14

Wife is like that. I’ve given up on telling her anything when she’s just woken up. I’m some like that, but have a heart attack whenever the phone rings at an odd time, fearing it’s The Call about some loved one, that I remember the phone calls. And swear at the person who called at that hour because he figured I’d be home.

Too bad about AG’s friend. Give her my best, as if she’d understand condolences from one of your invisible friends.

15

Astroboy, I’m also chiming in on having conversations all the time and not remembering a word in the morning.

The one thing I find creepy is that the two instances you emtnioned were girlfriends telling you someone committed suicide. If I were you, I’d be afraid to sleep :wink:

16

First of all, my sympathies to AG.

Second, I hope like H-E-Double Toothpicks AG’s parents might be a shade more understanding of how important it is to marry for love and not family politics. Now is the time for you to be with your gal.

Last, don’t sweat the memory lapse. It used to happen to me when I had really extended hours and slept in a narcoleptic stupor.

17

This happens to me, too. Someone will wake me up to start a conversation, I’ll sound more or less coherent, then I’ll fall back asleep and completely forget everything I was told. A lot of the time I sort of remember talking, but I can’t be sure if it was real or just a dream. My friends in college just accepted the fact that they would often get phone calls from me asking if we had talked a few hours earlier.

I don’t think it’s that serious a defect. The problem may just be that you’re on a different sleep schedule from the people around you, so they’re often talking to you while you’re still trying to wake up.

–sublight.

18

Thanks all!

I’ll pass along your condolences to Astrogirl…

As far a moving the phone away from the bed goes, however, that’s not possible… in my tiny little (but free!) dorm-room, there is no “away from the bed”! (OK, slight exaggeration, but really there is no other place to put it!:D)

Fortunately, AG is usually pretty understanding!

19

Please add my condolences to the pile.

And, the exact same thing happens to me. Been happening all my life, since I was a small child. The first time I remember, I woke up at midnight one time when I was in 4th grade and apparently felt an urgent need to ask my dad what the name of my school principal was. Don’t ask me what that was about. I can: carry on conversations, in person or on the phone; get out of bed, use the restroom, and return to bed; hit the snooze button and/or rip the alarm clock out of the wall (I have three now, in strategic locations around the room); let the cat out of the house-- all without really waking up or remembering a single thing about it the next day.

One summer I was staying in a dorm at Stanford University, and the doors on the dorm rooms locked automatically every time the door closed. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night, climbed down from the top bunk, left the room, walked down the hall, used the bathroom, walked back down the hall, and woke up standing outside my locked door. My poor roommate. I did the same thing two more times that week before we taped a key to the bottom of the door.

Another time, while at school last year, I woke up and left my room and ran into my then-girlfriend in the hallway. We had an entire conversation there, and supposedly I was quite brusque. This subsequently got me in trouble, although I had no idea why I was in the doghouse the next morning. She had a hard time understanding (and believing in) my difficulty.

All this to say that you are not alone, and I think this may well be a more common problem than any of us had envisioned.

20

I have TWO in-between states where I will interact but have no memory later. I have one where I will respond to people talking to me in a fairly logical (though gruff) manner, though sometimes a bit out of character (I seem to get mad easy). I have another where I look like I am awake and hearing what the person is saying, but apparently my mind is creating bizarre new scripts for the other person. My wife woke me up to tell me something and get my opinion, and she said after I sat in bed and listened to her a while and she asked me what I thought, I told her something about how you could save blood if you had two vampires, and started talking about what ratios of blood types would be best or something like that - she can’t remember what I said but she said it was bizarre and a little disturbing.